Daniel Yanofsky; Canada’s First Chess Grandmaster

Daniel Yanofsky, 74, Canada’s first chess grandmaster. Yanofsky was born in Poland but moved with his family to the Canadian prairie as an infant. He learned chess from his father at 8 and was soon recognized as a prodigy. At the age of 11, he took on 22 players in a simultaneous exhibition, winning 17 matches and losing five. At 14, he competed on Canada’s four-person chess team at the Chess Olympiad in Argentina. He went on to win eight national championships and was named grandmaster, the highest title in international chess, in 1964. “He was mainly a strategist, as prodigies often are,” said Cecil Rosner, a chess columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press. Though he failed to keep up with new opening strategies that developed over the years, Yanofsky would win matches at the end because of his “innate natural ability,” Rosner added. Yanofsky chose a law career to make ends meet and held local government posts in and around Winnipeg for 25 years. On March 5 of cancer in Winnipeg.